How to find the best time to Tweet

Any Twitter users out there? Join me today, as I go about finding the best time to Tweet. This turned into a MUCH bigger post than I had first envisaged, so here’s how I’m going to manage this:

Experimenting, and the tools and methods you can use

Scheduling, and the tools you can use

Results from some heavy-hitters

More results, this time from my own research

I will NOT be looking at how to send effective Tweets (that’s next time!)

So what is the best time to Tweet?

That question is not as straightforward as it seems. I’d love to be able to say to you ‘Tweet at 8.15 am for best results’, but it’s not that simple, I’m afraid. Depending on where you are in the world, there are different ‘best’ times. There are also best times to tweet for likes, best times for retweets, best times for clicks.

Just tell me the answer

I am not sure there is a definitive answer, as what works on one day may not work on another. My advice at this point would be to experiment. Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you there.

Experimenting, Part 1: Tools

There is a surprisingly large number of analysis tools available on the internet. In keeping with my theme of FREE resources, here are three that you can use for free:

FollowerWonk

Followerwonk: its tag line is ‘Find, analyse and optimize.’ For any of you out there that dream about stats, graphs and charts, this is for you. Visit the site and sign up with Twitter for your free account. Click on ‘ANALYZE’, enter your username and select ‘ANALYZE THEIR FOLLOWERS’. Click ‘Do it’ and watch the results roll in.

One of the good things about this free service, is just a short scroll down the first page, you will see a chart showing the times that all your followers are active. Here’s my followers:

You can take a note of these times and plug them into your Tweet-scheduling tool of choice (more on that next), or you can open yourself a free Buffer (see below) account and get the best times auto-scheduled for you!

Tweriod

Tweriod: ‘Start Tweeting when others listen.’ Another FREE tool, Tweriod can analyse your Twitter account and your followers and provide you with the times when your followers are online, but it will also tell you when best to post for maximum exposure. More graphs:

The graph here is for my Twitter followers. You can clearly see the peak time to catch the maximum amount of my followers. Yours may be different. You can even drill down further to look by the hour, although I’m not sure why you’d need that level of detail.

Audisense

Audisense: this is not a tool for everyone. The link I have given you will take you to the FREE signup, and if you can, you should. I say if you can, because the free account is only available to people with a Twitter Community of under 5000. That means the sum of all your followers plus all those you follow must be under 5000.

Experimenting, Part 2: Tweeting

Okay. So you’ve identified some times that you’d like to try. Now what?

Fire off some Tweets at the suggested times and see the results of your research! That presents you with two problems: Firstly, how do you see the results of your efforts?

On your Twitter page, click on your ‘profile and settings’ and there you will find ‘Analytics.’ You will see a breakdown of all your activity by month. At the bottom of each month, you will see ‘View all Tweet activity.’ That gives you this:

As you can see, there is an awful lot of information, but down the middle you will see a breakdown of all your Tweets, along with all audience engagement numbers. Click a Tweet to break it down further. There are enough stats here to keep everyone happy (but be aware of procrastination!).

The second problem is do you need to stay awake all night if want to post at midnight? No. That’s where scheduling comes in.

Scheduling your Tweets

Other than making your children get up at night to Tweet, your best option is to use one of the free scheduling tools available to you. There are several, but I will mention the two that I use:

Buffer

Buffer – Easy to use, Buffer links up nicely with some of the above analysis tools. In Followerwonk, once the analysis has discovered the most productive times to be Tweeting, you can ask Buffer to create a custom Tweet schedule for you. You can tell it how many times you want to Tweet, and it will go off and do its thing, like so:

The free version will only allow ten Tweets to be scheduled at a time. Boo.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite – Unlike free Buffer, free Hootsuite will allow you to schedule many Tweets, days, even weeks into the future. Track all your mentions, Retweets, and followers all in one place.

Similar to some of the analytics tools I mentioned at the beginning, Hootsuite has a nifty autoschedule function, which will analyse you account and followers and will suggest the optimum time for each post.

Results from Buffer and Hootsuite

Buffer’s Results

My 2000 followers is a drop in the ocean compared to these heavy-hitters. Buffer, for example, analysed 4.8 million Tweets over 10k profiles. This is what they discovered:

Early morning Tweets receive the most clicks

Evenings and late nights receive the most Retweets and clicks

The most popular time to Tweet and get engagement differs across timezones, so I would recommend doing your own research to find these times

General observations from their findings:

12pm to 1pm (local time) is the most popular time to Tweet

3am – 4am The fewest Tweets are sent

11am – 1pm The highest volume of Tweets

2am – 3am Earn the most clicks per Tweet

9am – 1pm Fewest clicks per Tweet

I think some of these numbers are counter-intuitive. Tweeting at the time when the fewest Tweets are sent improves your click-rate, perhaps because your Tweets have less competition for eyeballs. By far, most of my Tweets are made early morning, UK time, and as a result, I get most of my traffic coming from the West Coast of the US. Following this research I will be changing my Tweet-times to become a bit more Euro-friendly.

Optimising for highest engagement, the graph is very clear in its findings:

It is almost the reverse of the most popular time to Tweet, giving credence to the idea that more Tweets makes it harder to find your Tweet among the thousands of other.

Hootsuite’s Results

Hootsuite offers similar results but also notes that the average half-life of a Tweet is 24 minutes (compared to 90 for Facebook). This stat shows how important it is to optimise the times you are Tweeting.

Their data suggests that the best time to Tweet is 3pm Monday to Friday. Hootsuite also argues that the best time for engagement (clicks, Retweets) is 12pm – 3pm, going against Buffer’s findings.

Hootsuite also suggest creating a different Twitter handle for each of your most important timezones, but I would suggest that unless Twitter is driving most of your traffic, that could be a bit excessive.

Similar to some of the analytics tools I mentioned at the beginning, Hootsuite has a nifty autoschedule function which will analyse your followers and create what it considers to be the optimum time for each Tweet.

My results

Does my research agree with these results? Here’s what I found from my (albeit brief) research:

At first glance, the lines are not as easy to interpret. If I’d been able to use a million Tweets, they may have levelled out slightly. The chart above does, however, show the per click average for the different forms of engagement.

Observations

For me, the early evening, 5-9pm was best for Retweets

The most likes occurred early afternoon, 2pm, and late at night, 11pm

The best time to Tweet for clicks is during the 4 – 9pm slot

Although some of these results fly in the face of what I’ve discussed earlier, they can somewhat be explained when you look at the average reach for each of my Tweets over the same time-period:

What should you take away from all this?

Although the data suggests trends in finding the best time to Tweet, the various times I have mentioned here should be the jumping off point for your own research; you should not expect to plug in the times I mentioned and see your engagement rate go through the roof. The suggested times are just that: suggested times. If my results have shown anything, it’s that you should test what works for you and your followers. So, follow these steps:

Start with the autoschedule for Hootsuite, or use Followerwonk to suggest the best times to schedule your Buffer Tweets.

Look at the results and

Alter your strategy accordingly.

Don’t get me started on ‘how to write effective Tweets’. I’ll do that next. Right now, I need to have a lie down in a dark room.

Who Is Steve Boseley?

Steve lives in Nottingham, UK with his wife and two children. Most of his work falls in the ‘dark fiction’ category, which stems from being brought up on Stephen King novels and short stories, and a steady diet of The Twilight Zone / Tales from the Crypt. You will see some of that influence in his second book, A Sinister Six, a collection of darkly disturbing stories, where the ordinary and mundane become extraordinary and fantastic. A Sinister Six is available from Amazon for just 99c.

A very active sportsman, Steve went back to university to study Sport Science (anatomy and physiology) and expected to move into a career in sports. Instead, he worked with children and young people for several years, before being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at the age of just 30. He now works for a local charity, supporting and empowering disabled people. Writing resurfaced following his diagnosis, offering endless imaginary worlds to escape in to.

Fantastic detailed info as always NIcholas. Much appreciated. Honestly, I can’t spend that much time, pre- tweeting and looking for best times. I don’t like to pre-schedule either. I read something of interest (like your posts) and I tweet them, lol. My blog reading is done later in the evening when lots gets shared, as well as early mornings when I share articles I’m reading from newsletters. Something must be working because I seem to have a nice following, lol. 🙂

I love Hootsuite and swear by it. It’s such an incredible tool and it helps me customize tweets according to hard facts.

The one thing you have to keep in mind is that when you have followers all over the world (like I do), it’s always the noon hour (or early morning or evening) somewhere in the world. On average I tweet through all my social media networks 4-5 times an hour.

I love your idea of the daily pinned tweet, Charles. I change mine out about 1-2 times a week.

It seems to me (from my extensive study of these charts of course) that many people are turning to Twitter in their lunch break. That means that Mr Trump must have exceedingly long lunches. 🙂
If I was ever going to wonder about the best times to Tweet, these tips from Steve would be invaluable, I have no doubt.
Best wishes, Pete.

Thanks for this, Nicholas. It’s sort of like when is the best time to blog. For me, that’s whenever I have time. Thanks for the shout out tweet the other day – I have a twitter account but have let it slide recently while I dealt with a particularly hard chest cold!

Interesting. I actually kinda gave up on the perfect time and went with a daily pinned tweet. I have it go live at midnight and there are usually 16-20 retweets by the time I wake up. Then I retweet throughout the day and I eventually end with 90-120 retweets before the next one goes up. One advantage of the daily pinned is that people don’t have to search your feed for it.

Sometimes. More on the newer books than the older ones. Yet, I can see a spike if I suddenly promote an older one after a while. The problem with Twitter seems to be most people retweet without hitting the links. I’m guilty of this too. Honestly, it’s hard for me to tell now because I’m kind of in limbo here.

That’s an interesting approach, Charles. You appear to have an effective system. Also of interest is the low level of clicks you mention. I’m still not fully sold on the idea of Twitter as an effective marketing tool, although some people seem to have great success. I just need to discover their secrets…

Part of the issue with Twitter might be the speed of posting. The more followers you have, the faster your feed moves. Hashtags help with getting exposure, but it definitely requires a lot of work. At the very least, doing searches. Yet, it does help to scroll through other people’s feeds to retweet authors that you both know or you want to make friends with. I’m thinking it’s more for networking than sales at this point. It’s weird. People look at your Twitter followers and judge your worth on that. So it could also be helpful simply as a status thing. Have you ever used the Thunderclap promo?

I haven’t used it in a while, but it’s a promo posting platform I see other authors use. You make a promo and give yourself a time limit to get 100 or so supporters. Each supporter offers up their Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr (why?) accounts to post the promo if it meets the minimum. It was fairly popular two years ago and led people to beef up their follower amounts. It’s more of a tool than a platform, but it gives you a being blast if you get it.